Researchers at Penn State University are claiming success in the preliminary rounds of their efforts to increase the potential of a program designed to strengthen relationships inside families.

The University has announced findings from a pilot study, as it launches a larger community trial made possible by a $3.3million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The activity focuses on the Strengthening Families program developed at Iowa State University in the early 1980s chiefly for the benefit of young people between the ages of ten and 14.

Since it was designed by Virginia Molgaard at Iowa’s Partnerships in Prevention Science Institute, Strengthening Families (SFP) and a number of later variations have performed well in experimental evaluations, and their impact on adolescent alcohol and substance use has earned the recognition of Blueprints for Violence Prevention.

SFP has also demonstrated long-term cost benefits. NIDA has calculated that every dollar spent on the program results in a $10 saving in social service expenditure.

The Penn State advocates are led by Douglas Coatsworth, associate professor of human development and family studies. Coatsworth believes program modifications will release the SFP’s potential to prevent other poor outcomes in the teenage years, such as risky sexual behavior.

"The Strengthening Families Program is one of the most promising universal family-based preventive interventions," Coatsworth says. "Research shows that it delays the onset of substance use, improves parenting practices, increases young people’s resistance to peer pressure and reduces aggressive or destructive behavior.

“However,” he concedes, “most of those studies have been done by the same research group, and independent replication will strengthen the evidence for the program's efficacy."

Strengthening Families has had more mixed reviews in recent times than his enthusiasm may suggest. Last year, a Washington trial reported that it had failed to have the promised impact on high-risk young people.

"We are testing a revised model of the Strengthening Families: For Parents and Youth 10-14, which is not the same Strengthening Families intervention used in the Washington study," Coatsworth explains.

"The SFP model we are adapting comes from the Iowa State group and has excellent empirical support – for use with rural families. We are adapting it by infusing some mindfulness teaching and practices into what we teach the parents.

"There are some unique features to our project including we will test the modified version against the original version and a home study control.

"So we will be able to test whether the added mindfulness activities improve intervention effects over and above those seen in the original program – a pretty stringent test that is not frequently used in prevention science.

"Our pilot results using a similar study design were very promising (NIDA must have thought so too)."

"We think that the new activities will help parents see their children’s behavior and their parenting from a more positive perspective. It is more likely than earlier tests to enhance the parent-youth relationships,” Coatsworth adds.

For the full study, the researchers are trialing the intervention with 600 families of sixth- and seventh-grade children in five Pennsylvania school districts.

Researchers involved in the project include Mark Greenberg, director of the Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development which is hosting the experiment, and Larissa Duncan at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.

• For more about Mark Greenberg and mindfulness, see: Listen, the talk show’s over – so mind how you go